The Illegal (10 page)

John decided to stop her. People who would watch his documentary needed to see, up close, how hard-working people—or at least some people—were in AfricTown.

“Where are you going, moms?” he asked.

“To work in Clarkson,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Maria Smith. Why are you filming me?”

“For a school project. For a documentary.”

“A documentary? Gonna make any money off that?”

“No. I’m a student. Grade 9.”

“You want to interview me, it will be fifty cents.”

John kept filming. “I pay fifty cents for breakfast. That’s a lot.”

“Pay me fifty cents, and make your own damn breakfast tomorrow.”

John fished two quarters from his pocket and handed them over. She slipped them quickly in her pocket.

“You have two minutes,” she said. “I can’t be late.”

“What kind of work do you do in Clarkson?” he said.

“Clean houses, fifteen dollars a day.”

“What’s your baby’s name?”

“Xenia.”

“Where’s her papa?”

“No papa around,” she said. She spat on the ground. “For all the help I get, that baby might as well have come along by means of virgin birth.”

John laughed. “Spontaneous combustion would have been more fun.”

She laughed with him. “Anyway. It’s just the baby and me. Ain’t I enough?”

“I’m sure you’re enough. I don’t have a papa either.”

Maria put her hands on her hips and stared into the camera. “Is that the kind of man you will be? Who leaves his own children?”

“Well, no,” John said. He hadn’t thought much about being a father. But no. If he ever had children, he would not want to leave them. He had never met his own father, but he did not want his kids to say the same of him. Ever. He said as much to Maria, who reached out and rubbed his head and told him that he was a good boy and should stay that way. John wished that his camera had been able to catch the head rub.

“How long does it take you to walk to work?”

“One and a half hours, each way.”

“That’s a lot of time.”

“It gets me out of AfricTown. Where I work, I get running water, fresh toilets. I can even shower. I wish I could work on weekends too, so there wouldn’t be a single day in the week when I had to shit in the pot and throw it in the ditch.”

“What do you use your money for? Clothes?”

“No, I get clothes from the women I work for. I can adjust any bit of clothing. Shorten, tighten and hem anything they give me. The clothes I get are always too big. I can take a dress apart and put it back together two sizes smaller. I’m so good that the women sometimes send me home with alterations that I do on Sundays. I charge extra for that.”

“So what do you use your money for?”

“Gonna send my daughter to school one day. Hey, your time’s up. And, boy, your shorts are dirty, and you got egg on your shirt. You can’t go to school looking like that. Don’t you have a mother?”

“I change into my clean clothes at school.”

“Okay. Clean up real good at school. You want to talk again, it will cost you one dollar. I got film experience now, so my rates are going up.”

John watched Maria walk north toward Clarkson. Over her head, and in the distance, past AfricTown and past Clarkson itself, the sun was hitting Flatrock Mountain and its gondolas, one of Clarkson’s most famous attractions. White tourists rode up in the daytime to take pictures of the city and Ten-Mile Inlet and, on a clear day, the Ortiz Sea. Young people rode the gondolas at night to dance in an upscale club on top of the mountain. But here in AfricTown, hardly anybody noticed Flatrock Mountain.

It took John ten minutes to walk to the Bombay Booty. He had a key to the door, and he had another to the caretaker’s closet, which kept the bucket, the mop and the cleaning solution. Half a cup of cleaning solution, a bucket of hot water, and off he went, rolling the bucket on wheels and mopping. Lula DiStefano did not tolerate dirt on her brothel floors. She had once shown up at the Clarkson Academy, said it was an emergency and hauled John back
to AfricTown in her car to make him rewash two floors that had not been cleaned to her satisfaction. Then she made him walk back to school.

John washed the halls of the first and second floors meticulously, and he cleaned the toilets, bidets and sinks, working steadily but carefully for one hour. The floors were made of Italian marble. Imitations of works by the Impressionists covered the walls. Monet, Degas, Renoir, all the sorts of works that would be popular with people in Freedom State. People, that is, who didn’t live in AfricTown.

John wanted out of this situation. He didn’t want to rely on Lula any longer. She liked having him in her debt, but if he had his way, it wouldn’t be for long. John’s documentary was going to propel him to the number-one ranking among students at the Clarkson Academy for the Gifted. He would then ask the principal to let him become a boarding student, for free. And to cover his necessities of life: school uniforms and other clothing, books and computer supplies. When his mother was well and living at home again, John could visit her, but he’d be out of Lula DiStefano’s clutches.

John finished his cleaning and made sure that even the closet where the bucket and mop were locked was spotless. Then he walked over to Harlan’s place. Harlan was one of Lula’s personal drivers, and on most mornings that John worked for Lula, Harlan drove him to school. It saved John an hour of walking, kept his runners from wearing down so fast, and gave him time to shower and dress before class.

As he often did, John asked Harlan to let him off at the gate to Ruddings Park, which was in the heart of Clarkson and just a block from his school. With its trees and open spaces and reservoir, the park was the most peaceful place in the city. A two-kilometre footpath for runners and walkers circled the water, and from it, he could watch hundreds of floating ducks. The park was right downtown, so John could see a crush of buildings beyond its trees. Business towers. Government buildings. Telecommunications facilities. Sports arena. Movie theatre. Opera house. John decided to walk around the
reservoir to calm his mind before going to school. He had half an hour: plenty of time to loop once around the reservoir trail and still make it to the locker room to shower and change and then get to his journalism class. So he began walking, counterclockwise as the signs instructed. The trail could be a busy one, so signs directed visitors’ movement to minimize congestion.

John had been walking for a minute when he heard something behind him. He turned to see a runner approaching extraordinarily fast. He was clearly a distance runner, and he was not sprinting, but he was coming toward John at twice the pace of most joggers. John, who had never seen him before, stood to the side and waved as the fellow drew near. The runner was a lithe black athlete of medium height. He wore a fanny pack strapped to the small of his back, bright yellow track shoes, black track shorts with slits high up the thighs and a white shirt. He was concentrating and working hard, but he nodded to acknowledge John’s salutation, and that made John feel good.

John removed his camera from his backpack. He watched the man run for another hundred metres and then slow to a jog and check his watch. John walked faster, keeping the man in sight as long as he could. Then the runner took off again at his high speed. John watched him pull two hundred, four hundred, six hundred metres ahead. It was hard to see him, because he had covered more than half the distance of the reservoir. Soon he would come all the way around and pass John again. John had been walking as fast as he could, but he repressed an instinct to run because he knew he would have looked silly. And either way, the runner would soon lap him. John had walked only one-fifth of the reservoir trail when the runner exploded past him again, then slowed to a jog.

“Excuse me!”

The man looked back at John.

“I was just wondering—what are you doing?”

“Training.”

“What kind of training?”

“Intervals. I run two kilometres in five minutes and forty-five seconds. Then I jog for two minutes.”

“And then you do it again?”

“Exactly. I must go now.”

“Wait, how many times?”

“Today, just six times. Sometimes ten.”

“Are you getting ready for a big race?”

The man lowered his voice. “Confidentially, the Buttersby Marathon. But that is just between you and me.”

“Do you mind if I film you? I’m making a documentary.”

“No, I’m very sorry. Have a good day.” He jogged another thirty metres, looked back once at John and then recommenced his insane pace.

John had never seen a runner move so quickly. The sun bounced off the water of the reservoir and caught his body as he rounded the slow curve up ahead. What could it hurt? John turned on his video camera, zoomed in and filmed him for ten or fifteen seconds. It was inspiring to watch the runner move so smoothly in the early morning in the calmest place in the city. It made John want to do something great too. From a distance, the running looked effortless, but John had heard the man breathing. He had seen the sweat on his forehead and the strain in his eyes. The marathoner ran with power and beauty, but it had to hurt like hell to work that hard.

B
EING FIFTEEN YEARS OLD BUT NOT YET FIVE FEET
tall came with one advantage: John was able to sit cross-legged in a wardrobe box in a walk-in closet of the Presidential Suite of Bombay Booty. He was reasonably comfortable. In case the task stretched on and he grew hungry, he had a peanut butter sandwich. To keep his hands free, he had strapped to his forehead a flashlight like a miner’s lamp. He wore great big earphones to monitor the sound levels. On his lap, he balanced his computer. His monitor was split into two screens—one for each of the hidden cameras with microphones that he had planted. Later, when he was assembling his documentary about AfricTown, he could splice images together. But for the time being, he had the laptop on pause and was waiting to hit the record button.

John had planted one camera over a painting above the bed and the other on a sculpture on the opposite wall. It was risky. But John had a documentary to make.

He heard footsteps, so he started recording. Two young women came into view. They stood near the foot of the king bed. They were girls, really; John guessed they were only seventeen or so, but they were made up and dressed to look older. One had light brown skin just a few shades darker than John’s.

The light brown girl wore a tan blouse cinched at the waist by a green belt with a big buckle. Why girls wore belts on their shirts was beyond John. She was about five foot five. The other girl was
as black as night. She was a few inches taller and wore a short dress that revealed the lower ridge of her butt when she bent over and smacked the bed.

John’s teacher, Manzell Reginald, would flip out if he saw any sex in the documentary. John would clean it up while editing. But he had to be here. He had to do this. He had heard about the sorts of mucky-mucks who came to AfricTown under the cover of night. Now he had to find out for himself, film it and show it to the world.

“The man I got tonight,” the short one said. “Lula says he’s a big shot. Likes his girls deferential.”

The tall one laughed. “The fuck that means?”

“Means do what he says.”

“Who are you, the Scrabble Queen?”

“I like to read,” the short one said.

“I seen you with that cellphone, playing Scrabble, Scrabble, Scrabble every chance you get. Girl, you addicted.”

“We’re in AfricTown, honey,” the short one said. “Girls getting deported left, right and centre. I can think of worse problems than Scrabble.”

“Scrabble is for eighty-year-old white ladies in nursing homes.”

“Scrabble’s just a game, Darlene.”

John scribbled in his notebook,
Tall, darker girl—Darlene.

“You keep on with that game,” Darlene said. “I’m here to make some money.”

“Me too,” the short one said.

“The money is great,” Darlene said, “but you know it won’t last. You see a single girl here over twenty-four? You gotta have a plan, girl.”

“Tomorrow, I’d like to buy a T-bone steak and a red dress. That’s my plan.”

Darlene laughed. “I’m saving up. One day, I’m gonna take accounting at the Clarkson Community College. Fifteen thousand dollars for a three-year course. All the time people say, ‘I like to work
with people.’ To hell with that. Who needs people? People
do
things to you. Give me numbers and paper, any day.” Darlene turned to look at herself in the mirror. “Lula says girls who eat too much turn big-assed after twenty-one.”

“You’re a year away from twenty-one and a long way from big-assed,” the short one said. “I say you’re perfect.”

“You’re a doll, Yvette.”

John wrote in his book:
Short, light-skinned girl—Yvette.

“Hey, kid,” Darlene said. “Ask me a number. Anything. Go on. Do it.”

“Thirteen times eight.”

“Shee-it. That’s easy. If I roll thirteen men eight times, that’s 104 times I’m getting paid. And in case you wondering, 104 times two hundred dollars is 20,800 big ones. Count it that way, Yvette.”

John admired the tall girl. He liked her attitude. He found it hard to believe that she was stuck in a brothel, worrying about whether her ass was too big. He wished he had a sister. Or a brother. Someone who was older, wiser and in his corner.

John had read that if you were mixed but wanted to be black, you had to fight extra hard to establish your identity. You had to out-black the blacks. This documentary was his way of staking a claim.

“Lula says I have to do something extra tonight,” Yvette said.

“What?”

“Take his ID and find some papers that make him look bad.”

“Don’t do it, girl.”

“Why not? She’s paying me an extra two hundred dollars. Says I’m a good reader, so I’ll know if I see something good.”

“It’s not right, the way she makes the illegal girls do bad shit.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Darlene? I’m from here. I am not from Zantoroland.”

Darlene lowered her voice. “Everybody says they’re born here, girl. They arrest me, I’ll say that too.”

“It’s true. You don’t believe me?”

“Don’t matter what I believe. I’m not your problem. If you got
handcuffs on, you know what the question is: ‘Where’s your national citizenship card?’”

“Just because I don’t have one doesn’t mean I wasn’t born here. And Lula’s going to help me get a card.”

“Good luck with that,” Darlene said.

“All I got to do is pay her, and she’ll get me a card in no time at all. In fact, I’ve been taking half-pay for two months. Lula has me on a savings plan. She keeps the other half and says that when I’ve saved twenty thousand, she’s gonna fix me up with a citizenship card and a passport.”

It might have been the same for John, with a father from Zantoroland who disappeared before he was born. But he never had to worry about being arrested and deported. Because his mother was white. Freedom Statonian, born and raised. And his father, apparently, had become a naturalized citizen. So John had his citizenship. He felt guilty about that, having something so many others needed.

AfricTown told you all you needed to know about Freedom State. An island continent that was nearly two thousand kilometres north to south and more than half that distance east to west, Freedom State had grown rich by developing tobacco and rice plantations and exporting wood coveted by European furniture makers in the nineteenth century. It boasted one of the world’s oldest and most stable parliamentary democracies, and its citizens—if you excluded the residents of AfricTown—were among the wealthiest in the world.

The country had deported all the black people it could after the abolition of slavery, but try as it might, it could not prevent the descendants of its slaves from returning boat by boat, year after year. They were fleeing troubles in Zantoroland and seeking work and prosperity. But Freedom State would not admit, acknowledge or legalize them, so they clustered in AfricTown.

AfricTown, Oh, AfricTown. His country’s moral blight. His home.

Darlene cut into John’s thoughts. “Savings plan, huh? I’m your numbers girl, and you know what I say to that?”

“What?” Yvette said.

“Fuckin’ robbery.”

Yvette checked her lipstick in the mirror. “I want that card. Should have got one when I was born. But I’ll have it eventually.”

“Whatever,” Darlene said. “It’s your business. But be careful with the big shot.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Yvette. “I’ve done this before, you know.”

“Not this, girl. You ain’t done no spying. Keep your eyes open. And if he asks, don’t say a word about seventeen. You’re twenty-one. Got that? Twenty-one!”

John scribbled in his notebook:
Yvette, 17
. He checked his laptop. Plenty of battery power. The cameras were working fine. He tried to breathe as quietly as possible.

“Get out of here!” Yvette nudged Darlene toward the door. “You got your own work to do!”

Darlene gave Yvette a hug and left. Yvette disappeared from camera range. John could see the king-sized bed, the reproduction of a Monet painting above the pillows—a thousand dabs of paint made to look like water sparkling under a bridge. On each of the bedside tables, a lamp rose out of the back of an ebony-carved elephant. The bedroom looked nothing like the rest of AfricTown. In fact, John realized, it had been made to look like anywhere
but
AfricTown.

John heard Yvette walk into the bathroom and felt uncomfortable listening to her pee. Out of respect, and to save his batteries, he paused the recording. He heard her wash her hands. Brush her teeth. Gargle. And then she sang. John switched the sound back on. This was good B-roll. She was singing a country song: “Constitution.” Everyone was singing it lately. It had crossed right over into mainstream radio and was polluting the national airwaves.

We got a Constitution for two, baby, our own book of rules.

Subsection Two, Part Three

Says don’t you never go runnin’ from me.

How could a seventeen-year-old girl working nights in the Bombay Booty in AfricTown go for country, of all things? “Constitution”?

There were two brisk knocks on the door.

Yvette came back into camera range. John hit record and widened the angle. With his fingers on the computer pad, he could manipulate the cameras to follow the action. The door opened, and a man stepped in. He towered over Yvette. Late fifties. Lean build. Brown eyes, brown hair. He wore a beige turtleneck and black slacks, and he carried a briefcase.

Nobody would believe him, unless he showed the video: John was looking at the prime minister of Freedom State. Graeme Wellington, no doubt about it. John read the papers. He knew the score. And now, he knew he was in over his head. A documentary about AfricTown, yes. But how could he have been so stupid? People were killed for the things they knew. Or sometimes they just went missing. Whatever was about to happen here, John didn’t want to see it.

The prime minister stared at Yvette’s body. “Not bad,” he said.

“Come in,” Yvette said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He removed a wallet from his pants pocket, slid it into his blazer pocket and hung the blazer on a coat stand.

“Show me a little more,” he said.

She unfastened a button of her blouse. “You like what you see?”

“One more,” he added, motioning to her buttons. “Take your bra off, but leave your shirt on.”

She turned away from him, and with the other camera, John caught her unfastening her bra and ditching it on the pillow. John had not come for the show. He did not want Yvette to remove her clothes, and he did not want to see her get close to the prime minister. Yvette was built like a woman, but she was only a girl. She could be a senior student in his school. They could be walking down the halls together, talking about their teachers.

“My name’s Yvette,” she said. “What shall I call you?”

The prime minister snatched her arm. John saw Yvette wince,
and inside the box, he winced too. The prime minister was alone in a room with a seventeen-year-old girl, and he could do whatever he pleased.

“Nobody will know about this. Right?”

“Nobody will know,” Yvette said. “I’m a professional.”

John noticed Yvette steadying her lower lip. She had not liked being grabbed like that. If a man that big had violence on his mind, how long would it take him to break Yvette’s neck or strangle her? If he discovered John hiding in the room, he could do it to him too. He wouldn’t leave any witnesses. John tried to settle his nerves by focusing on the computer and zooming in a little closer on Wellington’s hand on Yvette’s arm.

“That’s a good girl.” The prime minister released her.

Yvette said, “How about if I undress you?”

“No. Sit on the bed. There, on the edge. Keep your blouse open. Like that. Hang on. I need to do something.”

He put his briefcase flat on the bed, opened it and pulled out a file. He flipped through some papers and pulled his Planet cellphone out of his pocket. Those things were cool. You could call anywhere on the planet. No dead zones. He typed out a quick email with his thumbs, sent a message and appeared to be scrolling. Then Wellington put the file back and closed the briefcase. His cellphone rang, and he studied it.

“I have to take this. Wait here. Unbutton the rest of that,” he said, staring at her blouse, “but leave it on.” He left the room.

Yvette did not unbutton her blouse. Instead, she leapt up and, to John’s horror, rifled through the PM’s blazer. She opened his wallet but ignored the cash and credit cards. She found the national citizenship card that every citizen of Freedom State was required to have on their person when in public. There was a fine for not carrying it. Yvette looked at the card, and her jaw dropped. “Holy shit,” she muttered. John zoomed in and caught it on camera, too:
Graeme Arnold Wellington
. She kept the card but left the rest intact and put the wallet back in his blazer pocket.

Then she walked over and opened the closet door where John was hiding. It was weird seeing her back on his computer monitor as she looked at the very box in which he sat, hidden. He heard a click as she placed the national citizenship card on the shelf overhead. Then she closed the closet, walked to the door to the hall and put her ear against it. She pressed the button in the knob to lock the door, returned to the bed and opened his briefcase. John’s camera followed. She opened the manila file, and John zoomed in. Yvette looked at a handwritten message on an otherwise blank piece of paper. John zoomed in, but could only catch a few bits of the note.

Bossman

. . . firmed up the deal with GM . . . we . . . do this on your orders. Off books, $ only. We can keep intercepting bathtubs, return to Z. We pay $2,000 p/k . . . We pay Z—through GM—$10,000 p/k for . . . up to 20 dissidents/year . . .

Please approve ASAP,

Whoa-Boy

P.S. Lula has three for you. Asking 10x the usual fee. Petty cash issues. Talk her down?

John shook his head in confusion. Who was Whoa-Boy? What did it all mean?

Yvette closed the file and returned it to the briefcase. She went to the closet. John could hear her hand patting the shelf overheard, and now she was opening the top flap of John’s cardboard box. Maybe to hide the prime minister’s ID. John tried to shift but too late. Her hand grazed the top of his head. She opened the box and let out a little cry.